Demands of Partisanship Bring Change to the Senate

WASHINGTON, May 19 - The bitter struggle in the Senate over restricting filibusters is the culmination of years of growing partisanship and ideological warfare that have transformed this 18th-century institution. Many senators entered the battle with a grim sense of inevitability, saddened but not surprised that it had come to this.

Older senators talk wistfully of a more civil era that they say has now largely vanished. The few remaining centrists say the fierce partisan currents make it very hard to build the bipartisan coalitions necessary to do something big -- like changing Social Security -- or to defuse internal disputes like the present one over judges.

Senators in both parties complain about the increasingly aggressive demands of outside advocacy groups on issues like judicial nominations, and their unwillingness to settle for anything less than victory.

"They almost all succumb to the notion that the ends justify the means," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, reflected this week.

Scholars and historians caution against romanticizing the past; the older senator bemoaning the passing of a more courtly and civilized era is something of a tradition on Capitol Hill. Sarah Binder, an expert on Congress at George Washington University, said that the conflict between protecting the rights of the minority and accomplishing the agenda of the majority, now front and center in the Senate, was a very old one.

Still, the Senate is different. More and more lawmakers have gone to the Senate from the House, and taken with them the House's more partisan mind-set. More and more of the techniques of the modern campaign have been brought to bear in the Senate -- war rooms, rapid response, daily attacks and counterattacks -- continuing the partisan battles of the last election in another setting.

In short, an institution envisioned in The Federalist Papers as a "salutary check on the government," unswayed by the passions of the day, is instead at the eye of the ideological storm. And it is showing the strains.

Some "institutionalists" -- those who think about the Senate they will leave behind -- say that many senators are now putting short-term political interests above the constitutional prerogatives of the Senate. "There are fewer people in the Senate who think of it as an institution," said Senator Paul S. Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, who is retiring next year after 30 years in the Senate. "They put first and foremost their party allegiance, particularly when they have a president of their own party."

Mr. Sarbanes and other Democrats said they were disappointed that more of the senior Republicans had not stepped forward to avert this attempt to limit judicial filibusters. After all, Democrats assert, the rules change would shift power from the Senate to the executive branch, giving the White House much more unfettered power over nominations, and setting a dangerous precedent for restricting minority rights.

Some of those senior Republicans are, in fact, at the center of the effort to find a compromise.

But many Republicans -- including five of the most senior and powerful lawmakers who made their case at a news conference on Thursday -- argue that Democrats have already damaged Senate tradition by denying the president's judicial nominees an up-or-down vote.

And Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia and one of the newer generation of senators, said he hoped he never got accustomed to the mind-set of colleagues who "worship process." He said he was far more concerned about delivering on the promise he made last year as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee -- to get the president's nominees into the courts.

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In fact, activists on both sides say it is not surprising that political passions are so intense -- what could be more fundamental than the shape of the courts, and eventually the shape of the Supreme Court? And why should the Senate be immune to the same sharp divisions that dominate the rest of American politics and have turned liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats into endangered species?

"It really does start with a polarized electorate," said Richard Fenno, an expert on Congress and a political scientist at the University of Rochester. "People go there girded to do battle."

Warren B. Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, said his fellow Republicans had a right to be angry about Democratic tactics. Still, Mr. Rudman said he thought the attempt to prohibit judicial filibusters was dangerous. "It hurts the minority, and the Republicans will someday be in a minority again," he said.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, argued that there was, in part, a generational issue in play, pointing out that many of the newer Republican senators had spent very little time, if any, as a minority. "If you haven't been here under those circumstances, you don't appreciate how important these rights are," said Mr. Dodd, a senator for 25 years, who noted that he had served under nearly every possible configuration of power.

Increasingly, Democrats complain (and some Republicans privately agree) that their chamber is taking on the characteristics of the House -- where the majority has substantially more power, and where redistricting has driven both parties to their ideological bases.

That should not be surprising; more than half of the current Senate has come from the House. Twenty years ago, fewer than a third did. These transplants from the House now account for some of the most powerful, and most partisan, members of the Senate, like Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the third-ranking Republican in the chamber.

But partisanship is hardly confined to Republicans. The Democrats have maintained solid opposition to the president on Social Security.

In fact, partisan voting in 2003 was at a 50-year high in Congress as a whole, and 2004 was nearly as high, according to a Congressional Quarterly analysis of roll-call votes. Senate Republicans voted with their party 90 percent of the time in 2004; Senate Democrats 83 percent of the time, according to an analysis of important votes in which party leaders staked out clear positions. Some scholars say voting has not been this polarized for a century.

Some senators sought to be reassuring in this week's debate, arguing that very little was unprecedented in the Senate. Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, told his colleagues Thursday that this struggle was just the way the Senate worked -- great clashes, thundering roars, and then the issue fades away. But scholars and senators agree the clashes are particularly sharp these days, and they come very quickly, and they do not fade away.